I recently came across this amazing free SEO analytics site called SERP Analytics. At the first glance, it looked to me like a normal search site but as I started digging deeper, I realized that it has got a set of powerful tools for SEO specialists, Internet Marketers and bloggers.

SERPAnalytics.com is an online solution and hence you don’t need to download anything to get started – not even a browser toolbar as in the case of some other solutions. Some of the exciting features of this include detailed site statistics from SEO point of view, top paying AdSense keywords, SEO parameters under live search results from Google, Yahoo or Bing etc and lot more as explained below.

Salient features of SERP Analytics

The following are some of the key features available with this suite of tools:

Search Results Analytics

The comprehensive search analytics tool allows you to analyze the search results (SERPs) for a particular keyword or domain to come up with the following information

- More than a dozen SEO parameters (such as PR, Yahoo backlinks, Quantcast rank, Number of search clicks received, whois record etc.) right under the search result. If you use the domain name for search, it is also a great way to see the SEO parameters of all internal (or linked) pages. You can customize the parameters that you want to show
- The above mentioned parameters is available for Google, Yahoo and Bing
- The SERP summary is available in a separate float window by the side of search results
- Original search results (without SEO parameters) from the selected Search Engine can be still seen in a separate window
- Archived SERPs
- Domain summary lists some of the important aspects about a particular site including its top keyword ranks, search traffic received etc.

SEO Tools

The tools page of SERPAnalytics provides the following SEO Tools.

- Google Data Center tool lets you to research the search results from multiple data centers simultaneously
- Country Tool allows you identify SERP positioning of your keyword up to five selected countries at a time. This feature is available again for all three leading search engines

(There are a few other tools available in the SEO Tools section which seems to be reorganized and regrouped as I write this post)

Top paying keywords

Yet another cool feature of this site is the Free Top 10000 keyword tool that keeps getting updated from time to time. This keyword list can be filtered, searched for and sorted based on parameters such as cost per click (CPC), number of searches, number of clicks reported etc. This can also be downloaded as a CSV file. So next time you want some hot search words that bring more money per click, you know where to look for.

Conclusion

The SERPAnalytics site has got a lot more features than I could cover in this review. It is certainly one of the best SEO tools that is available online for free. Please check out SERP Analytics yourself and provide your feedback as comments here.

Happy SEO!

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Well, that’s a question I keep asking myself from time to time. A lot of people start blogging mainly because they were introduced to and inspired by certain blogging idols or super successful bloggers. Some others do blog because they think it’s cool and the rest do it for other benefits such as online income.

However, too many bloggers ditch blogging half way through even before giving it a whole-hearted attempt. This is mainly because they did not originally have the ingredients to be successful in online writing. So what does it take to be a successful blogger who takes blogging as a serious hobby or even as a profession?

#1 Writing skills

Blogging is first about writing! Unless you possess decent writing skills – even when writing about technical topics for that matter – blogging is not meant for you. Having writing skills alone won’t be sufficient if you do not enjoy writing.

#2 Creativity

So you are good at writing! But people will soon get bored of glorified rubbish unless you are creative and innovative with your ideas. Most successful bloggers already know the next few topics they are going to write about. Many times those who do a lot of research and online/offline reading always have enough innovative things to write about.

#3 Originality

When was the last time you wrote or read something very original on a blog? Many upcoming bloggers perish because they depend on other feeder blogs for ideas. The most successful bloggers are those who have the most original ideas to write about. It is acceptable if you promote inspired or stale ideas once in a while but more often you should ignite your own new ideas in order to become successful in blogging.

#4 Networking Skills

The main difference between online and offline writing is that you get your readers’ feedback instantly in the case of online writing. This is mainly because of the collaborative nature of blogging as well as the capabilities of its supporting paraphernalia (social media, social networking, subscription etc). Hence those who network better, open to feedback and work on their shortcomings will become successful sooner or later. The online networking skills enables a blogger to build a community around his topics and ideas not only to get accepted at the first level but also to become the evangelists of the same over the web.

#5 Sustainability

Finally, to persist with any hobby, passion or profession you need to have a lot of drive within you. You should be very good at time management and engage yourself – on a continuous basis – with all aspects concerning blogging. This includes understanding the trends and adapting accordingly, have self-defined goals (in the positive direction) and work relentlessly towards achieving them with focus. It is the persistence that makes a blogger a real super blogger!

Conclusion

There may be ten or fifteen other things that one can define as the qualities of a serious blogger but I believe that the above five are the major points. Now let me ask you bloggers :

(1) Are you putting serious efforts to become the next big name in the blogosphere?
(2) What are those two or three things that you do with respect to your blogging to sustain for long term?

Happy Blogging!

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Interactive Marketing is an evolving trend in Marketing whereby the customers’ inputs, thoughts and requirements are recorded and remembered – either from web inputs or analytics – and worked upon to provide solutions that best match their needs. Interactive Marketing is not Internet Marketing though web is certainly one of the major channels that helps to draw decisions based on various online data points (e.g. search phrase) regarding what the customer is looking for.

As per a recent Forrester report on interactive marketing, the money will gradually move away from traditional marketing and advertising channels into social media, mobile and email marketing. By 2014, interactive marketing will hit $55billion (in US alone) and this will be already 21% of the overall marketing spend. This post summarizes the findings from this report.

Interactive Marketing trends

The following are the bullet points from the forrester report:

• Search marketing still leads the interactive spend whereby 80% of marketers still depend on search advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• In 2009, 64% marketers already use social media applications to promote their products and this will grow further
• As against the predictions, email marketing continues to be an economical way to promote products as search marketing and advertising spend took an interim dip during recession
• Reaching your customers with mobile applications is a strategic advertisement model for the future (e.g. iPhone apps – there are already 40 thousand of them out there)
• Display advertising spend is slowly recovering after a few bad quarters
• Search marketing will slowly move away from text advertising to more media (video, images…) driven advertising
• Average time spend on the internet by US adults has now overtaken the average TV viewing time (big change from 2007) – the newspaper industry continues be challenged as well

Downloads

Complete Forrester report on interactive marketing 847KB: Very good read)

Make Money Online opportunities

The above trends indicate that there’s a huge make money online opportunity waiting for online marketers. You just need to hold on and keep updating your content to become successful out there. The next five years belongs to social media and interactive marketing!

Happy Money Making!

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There is no doubt that the Thesis from DIY Themes is an exceptional WordPress theme that is so easy to customize. As our blogger friend ZK rightly says “If god blogged, he would use the Thesis theme” which I agree to some extend assuming that the God is so bad at PHP that he could not afford to write his own WordPress theme.

Jokes apart, I have been having tough time with DIY folks – not with respect to the piece of software they have written but with the affiliate program (and the system) that they are offering. As you know, I am really interested in promoting selected good products on this blog as long as they fetch me some money via affiliate or referral sales.

Issues with the Thesis Affiliate Program

As you probably know I had run a Thesis, HostGator, OIOPublisher offer in the month of October whereby most of the affiliate income earned was being reimbursed to my referrals (I still do this). As part of this scheme, I also sold some Thesis theme licenses and the following was the situation with respect those sales.

Licenses sold: 7
Referral sales immediately recognized by the affiliate system: 3
Referral sales recognized after several support queries: 2
Referral income yet to be recognized: 2

The thesis affiliate support person, at that time, responded to my mails acknowledging that they have flaws in their affiliate system that sometimes does not recognize sales and they had to do it manually case by case. They also have a huge backlog on this manual process and to avoid all these they were planning to move to a new affiliate platform (Not sure if that’s the case yet)

Now my problem is that, I had offered discounts to my referrals which I mostly paid (except one case) on time expecting the money to come from the affiliate payout. Since it did not happen I am running on loss here with respect to that particular deal, which I do not like for sure.

Second problem, I am facing with the thesis affiliate links is that their online certificates seem to have expired and hence visitors to this blog (due to the affiliate code placed) are sometimes thrown an invalid certificate error. I am yet to remove the affiliate links as I am hoping that they will correct this issue. Also, since the product itself is really good, I am not removing the links as yet – Any inconvenience to my readers is regretted.

General problems with affiliate links

The affiliates face several issues with various affiliate programs that are available at the moment. The following are some the issues that I have faced.

• Affiliate clicks are not recognized at times mainly due to the poor logic (‘last click-through from’ logic)
• Even if the clicks are recognized, the sales will not be recognized against a partifular affiliate, because of the work flow completion issues (landing page to thank you page logic)
• The payment process takes too long (in some cases as long as three months) for unexplained reasons
• Minimum payment requirement sometimes is too high even for small products. Why can’t they release money on a monthly basis as soon as they mature?
• Instead of placing a simple HTML link code, sometimes they place huge scripts that could be malicious
• Some links and banners are non standardized (e.g. heavy JPG images, non-standard HTML)
• Affiliate support is poor and many times do not respond back. The support quality has deteriorated since recession hit (probably due to understaffing)

At this point of time, I should also mention some of the referral schemes that are run in a highly professional manner. Simon Emery of OIO Publisher is one such gentleman who is willing to listen to issues and always improvise. I also felt that the HostGator affiliate scheme is clean and organized.

Disclaimer

The emotions expressed here have nothing to do with the Thesis theme itself – It continues to rock and I still like it. But in order to promote the theme, there’s a certain incentive that we are all supposed to get and it’s just not happening in a consistent and transparent way.

Happy Blogging!

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Last month I had written a post about the basics of online forex trading. At that time I mentioned about the eToro forex trading platform where you can start a Forex trading account for just $50 (eToro supports PayPal transfer) and start trading instantly.

The eToro trading system now has improved features such as visual trading and support forex trading with investments as low as $2.5 per trade. This means that you now have the possibility of getting forex exposure for just a couple of dollars (Earlier the minimum investment requirement per trade was $25)

Forex Trading is no rocket science

As mentioned in my first post about Forex trading, it is one of the easiest (risky as well if not careful) mechanisms to make money online without having a blog or website. All that you need to do is to (1) sign up eToro (click the banner below to learn more) (2) Fund your account via PayPal or Credit Card and (3) start trading immediately.

eToro supports a FREE practice account where you can learn the tricks of Forex trading without putting your real money. Once you are comfortable with the buy/sell part, you can put real money starting with smaller amounts. With your eToro account you can not only trade all major currencies but also trade commodities such as Silver and Gold.

Related Posts

Online Forex Trading for Beginners

Happy Online Money Making via Forex!

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Nobody becomes an overnight blogging hero. If somebody has claimed so (s)he is a liar! It takes a lot of hard work to take a blog and the blogger behind the same to fame. However, there are times when all that effort is not returning any results after months and years of blogging. In such cases it just makes sense to start all over again instead of sticking with your current blog.

I have known a couple of online friends who did not exactly do any wrong things in their blogging life but ended up getting no visitors to their respective blogs. Eventually they had to quit. In today’s post let me explain why it is not a bad idea to start yet another blog instead of sticking to your current blog where you have already spent your time and money without being fruitful.

When to start it all over?

The following are some of the scenarios where it is better to start a new blog.

#1 You picked the wrong niche

At times people blindly pick a niche that is not exactly their strong area of domain expertise. Once you realize that and/or starts struggling to get new post ideas in that domain, you may call it quits and start something else.

#2 Monetization goals not met

Sometimes despite some visits, you may never ever make good money out of your current blog due to irreversible monetization strategy picked. In such cases it makes sense to move to something new.

#3 You caused a bad image or branding problem

There are situations where you create trouble for yourself via bad brand building tactics, black hat SEO or even used strong lies to promote your blog. Once that issue grabs public attention you may not have any other go but remain silent for a while and start something new. I know a blogger who always projected big stats about his blog and closed down immediately once people came to know about it.

#4 Not in the good books of Google and no organic visits

There are some blogs that – despite having done all kinds of onsite-offsite SEOs – remain un-indexed/ in low page rank forever or hardly attracts any search visits. This happens due to inexplicable reasons many times but very often it is due to some bad monetization practices from the past or the domain name used had a bad history. Despite this if you continue to be ignored by Google, it makes sense to start afresh again.

#5 Extinct topic

This happens to some blogs (and bloggers) that start in a clueless way. Sometimes they pick a domain name and niche to write about that has time bound relevance (e.g. a programming language that’s outdated already). Once the topic relevance is no more there you have no go but stop blogging under that domain name.

Did I miss out any other points? Have you ever thought of ditching your current blog and starting another one?

Happy Blogging!

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It is that time of the year where you do a lot of update activities on your blog including stock taking of the past year, wishing friends & family, setting goals, taking new year resolutions etc. It is also a good time to update certain important areas of your blog – Yes I am talking about updating the copyright year on the footer of your blog.

When I checked most of my friends’ blogs today I found that the copyright year is still 2009. Mostly, every year you hardcode this value but there is an easy way to auto update the copyright year using a simple one-liner script. Once it’s in place, you don’t have to worry about updating the year again. The following is the copyright script that you need to add to the footer of your WordPress blog (or any blogging platform running PHP):

Auto update copyright year script

The following is the simplest form of the script that you can include in an appropriate part of your footer:

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(’Y'); ?> YourBlog.com

(Just replace YourBlog.com with your blog name or domain name)

This will render your copyright information as:

Copyright © 2010 YourBlog.com

You can play around with other options such as:


&copy; <?php echo date('Y'); ?> YourBlog.com


..to get a result like this

© 2010 YourBlog.com

or even give an year range using…


Copyright &copy; 2005-<?php echo date('Y'); ?> YourBlog.com


..where the output will be as given below:

Copyright © 2005-2010 YourBlog.com

(Year range copyright assuming that 2005 was your starting year from when the copyright is applicable)

Note: This script takes the date and year information of the server. Hence, if your hosting server is in the US, and if you are browsing from India or so on New Year morning, do not panic if you see still 2009. By midnight or on the following morning you will see the copyright year reflected. You can also use a Javascript code to update the year which will overcome this minor issue but I prefer to stick with PHP.

Have you already updated the copyright year on your blog?

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During the month of January last year, I jotted down some exciting blogging objectives for the year 2009 and later provided two updates (March update & Septemer update) on how I was doing with respect to those goals.

Instead of providing a point by point update on those online goals (and their revisions), I thought of writing this postmortem report on what went well and what quite didn’t during the last one year. A lot of unexpected things happened in 2009 which, I thought, have forced several bloggers to quit blogging.

The year that was…

The following were some highlights of 2009 as far as my online activities are concerned:

Good

• Successfully conducted the SEO Challenge ’09 competition which was quite some experience for me and the participants
• Launched two niche blogs and a blog directory
• Self-wrote 117 posts (or one every three days) on this blog. I did not write elsewhere, nor did I really encourage guest posts here during 2009
• Established a decent online income stream whereby four-figure numbers were hit for three months
• Moved this blog to a better host
• Moved to a self developed WordPress theme

Bad

• I could not really do anything to improve the traffic to this blog. It is standing at pretty much the same numbers (or a little more than that) as last year
• Reduced the post frequency and time spent for my online activities
• Did not really concentrate on the social media – social network route to traffic and building communities
• Due to time constraints two of my WordPress plugin projects were delayed and I could not release the DS Premium theme for public use yet
• The ongoing recession impacted a few income streams and still not very clear as to what innovative routes to take

Ugly

• Though AdSense was never a major contributor here, getting banned by Google AdSense was really the worst thing to happen last year. I also dropped my niche blogging projects due to the same

Online Objectives for 2010

Since I have already reduced the time spent on my online activities, I do not want to be too specific in terms of measurable objectives this year. However, I would like to:

• Complete the WordPress plugin projects that I started with
• Experiment more with affiliate marketing as I expect the market to pick by mid of this year
• Conduct the SEO Challenge ’10 at a convenient time (not in the first Quarter for sure)
• Stop worrying about blog statistics as I already proved this year that some of these numbers hardly matter if you can really exploit the contextual traffic

I would have loved to set these goals as more measurable and specific but I really do not know if I will be able to spend a lot of time this year on blogging. After all, my software job demands more focus this year as most companies have hit the bottom and needs accelerated revival.

Over to you…

Have you already set your online objectives? If so, please share the same.

Happy Blogging!

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A short post today to wish you all readers of this blog a Very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2010!. May this New Year bring you success in your blogging and online business as well as your personal life.

I have been on vacation since Christmas and hence haven’t been able to update the blog since. I hope to be more regular with blog updates from next week onwards.

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Have a Wonderful New Year!

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If you want to do successful Internet marketing for the next one year (2010), I have a small advice for you. Just concentrate on Facebook alone! I am more than 100% convinced that 2010 will be the year of Social Networking Marketing and facebook will lead the pack.

Earlier this month, I had written a post about top internet marketing strategies for 2010 that covered points from SEO.com research. In that list, social network based Internet marketing was a major bullet point and today I am saying that it will be the strategy to concentrate on for the coming year. To be more precise just move your pieces around facebook and here are my reasons for the same.

What follows SEO?

Before even talking about facebook, it is my assumption that your online content (e.g. blog) already has a good amount of SEO done. This means that for the search & discovery model, Google is still the king. Once you have your SEO goals achieved, the one and only thing to concentrate on is your social network presence and the campaigns there in – Forget about all those RSS feeders, Twitter, Blog directories and email marketing. It is just not going to work except for the number games (# of readers via feedburner, # of twitter follows blah blah).

Why facebook?

SocNet Marketshare

Let me start with a nice picture that depicts the latest social network marketshare for November 2009.

This picture shows that the facebook is already having more than 46% marketshare among the US bound SocNet traffic. Since majority of the Internet marketing at the moment focus around the North America, this is a big number. Exactly an year ago, facebook’s marketshare was less than 20% and MySpace was a biggie then. In a years’ time the scene has totally changed.

Innovation kills competition

Facebook just beat its competition by providing a simpler unified user interface for all those features that others had in bits and pieces. They managed to do all these in a short timespan and hence ate into others’ marketshare. In other words what MyBlogLog, Twitter, Picasa etc could do separately now can be done with facebook. The relevance of blog directories and blog search engines are reducing now as facebook streams in that information as well. The result is that not much traffic to technorati, blog catalog etc and MyBlogLog is closing down next month.

SocNet Advertising will boom

I must say that, initially nobody really cared about the social advertising but things are changing fast since last five or six months. As people are spending more and more time online (and that too mainly on SocNets) the purchasing decisions in the future will be revolving around what they see and hear on SocNets and friends’ circle. In short, more than search engines, review sites and forums, SocNets will soon become the main base for online sales success.

Geo-targeting is already outdated?

PPC Advertising can deliver ads over geographies and pre-defined channels. But what a SocNet biggie like facebook can offer is to place the ads not only based on geography but based on other important parameters like their sex, individual tastes, types of friends and community they belong to, what they are talking about and looking for etc. because they have all this information in the profile data of the member. This simply means that real context aware ads will soon be a reality in the case of facebook advertising.

Fan pages will rock!

Facebook fan pages will soon do wonders by driving convertible traffic to your online content. If you do not have a facebook fan page yet, you might want to build one now because these will totally replace blog directories soon as I mentioned in the second point.

Conclusion

In my opinion, facebook’s marketshare may become something like 65-70% by the end of 2010 and hence you have every reason to be active on facebook for your internet marketing needs. I also believe that facebook advertising will grow by two or three times in the coming year and hence this is one place where you may want to concentrate on instead of running after less significant blog stats and numbers.

Happy Internet Marketing!

[PS: Please (social) bookmark this post if you found it useful]

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